Taylor Rehmet, an Air Force veteran and union leader who pulled off a stunning upset on Saturday in a deep red Texas State Senate district, did not grow up focused on politics.
His father was an airplane mechanic. His mother worked in a beauty salon. Both were Republicans. Mr. Rehmet, 33, started to think about politics — and to drift to the Democratic Party — only after he landed a job at a factory in his 20s and began reaping union benefits and workplace protections. He came to believe that more Americans should have the same.
“If we had this, the middle class would be stronger,” Mr. Rehmet said in an interview last month in an empty union hall in Fort Worth, across from the Lockheed Martin fighter jet plant where he works as a machinist. Occasionally the sound of an F-35 test flight shook the building.
A first-time candidate barely known inside Texas let alone outside the state, Mr. Rehmet catapulted to national attention late Saturday when he defeated a hard-line Republican candidate by 14 percentage points. His victory came in a district in and around Fort Worth that President Trump carried by more than 17 points in 2024.
With his surprisingly easy victory, in an unusually timed local special election runoff, Mr. Rehmet joined the ranks of working-class political stars who have begun captivating the Democratic Party.
His moderate appeal appeared to be based more on his genial style — he sports ample facial hair, smiles a lot and seems to really enjoy talking with people — than on any politically centrist positions he might have struck during the campaign. He avoided hot-button social issues, such as policies on transgender athletes, that turned off some swing voters in 2024.
“I’m not interested in the cultural war issues,” he said. “I’m working on, how do we get these people paid correctly?”
He is the latest in a string of candidates who have generated excitement and votes as political outsiders, showcasing their familiarity with the concerns of ordinary Americans because they are ordinary Americans.
In Maine, Graham Platner, an oyster farmer and military veteran, has blended working-class credentials and progressive politics to make a surprisingly strong run for the Democratic nomination for Senate against the Democratic governor, Janet Mills. Nathan Sage, an Iraq War veteran and mechanic, is vying for the Democratic nomination for Senate in Iowa. In Nebraska, Dan Osborn, an industrial mechanic and political independent, is running again for the Senate after having narrowly lost to Senator Deb Fischer, a Republican, in 2024.
The push for working-class candidates has been born of necessity — the erosion of white working-class support for the Democratic Party has accelerated in the Trump era. But Democratic political consultants say those candidates may be particularly salient in 2026 because voters want politicians who not only talk about economic challenges and affordability but appear to be affected by them.
“People are just demanding it,” said Michael Kolenc, who is working with Democratic candidates across Texas, including in Tarrant County, where Mr. Rehmet won. “They are genuine guys worried about pocketbooks, worried about everyone in their community. It comes out of frustration.”
Apart from the Senate, Democrats have fielded working-class and union candidates in at least a dozen House races around the country. Bob Brooks, the head of Pennsylvania’s firefighters union, is looking to flip a Republican seat around Allentown. Johnny Garcia, a deputy sheriff in San Antonio, is running to hold onto a seat that Republican lawmakers redistricted in their favor. There’s a farmer in North Carolina, Jamie Ager, and an ironworker in Ohio, Brian Poindexter.
“With the way things are going, I don’t think working people like you and me are going to hold on much longer,” Mr. Poindexter, who hopes to flip a Republican seat outside Cleveland, says in a campaign ad from a shop floor, while sparks fly. “I am tired of the Republicans who are in the pockets of the rich and the corporations. I’m tired of the sellout Democrats too.”
Viet Shelton, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said working-class candidates were “leading the charge” to help Democrats win in November.
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Republicans mostly waved away Mr. Rehmet’s victory as a fluke in a low-turnout election and played down the Democrats’ new crop of working-class and union candidates.
“They think that they can deceive voters by having all these candidates” who may appear moderate during the campaign, Christian Martinez, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said. “But at the end of the day they’re all pushing the same radical socialist agenda that we’ve seen take hold from New York to California.”
If Mr. Rehmet appeared to fit the mold of a candidate that Democrats have been eager to support in 2026 — burly, bearded, union-connected, still working with his hands — he said that no one in the party had asked him to run.
“It was my own decision,” he said.
He decided to run for the State Senate seat, in what had been a deeply conservative district of northern Tarrant County, after watching what he thought would be an easy piece of legislation fail at the Texas Capitol last year.
All the legislation did was say that “if you’re an employer with 50 or more employees, the Texas Workforce Commission will send you a free poster displaying all the veteran benefits and help available,” Mr. Rehmet said in disbelief.
The bill died in committee.
“That was just a shock to me, and so I said I’m going to get involved,” he said. “I’m tired of sharing stuff online. I’m tired of seeing both sides campaign in the world of outrage.”
Mr. Rehmet grew up in Garland, a suburb of Dallas, and said he often spent long hours at the beauty salon where his mother worked. “It was mostly older clientele, and when they would pass away, my mom would offer to do the hair, makeup and nails for the families that were grieving for free,” he said. “That just kind of taught me a lot about dedication to folks and to the community, even in death.”
After high school, he tried college but then enlisted in the Air Force, serving as a mechanic on B-52 bombers in North Dakota, in the same unit his grandfather once worked. When Mr. Rehmet moved back to Texas, he found a job at the Lockheed Martin plant and joined the union, he said.
“Right now, the only party that truly works with unions, it feels, is Democrats,” he said. “And it’s not enough.”
Mr. Rehmet’s political foothold is tenuous. The election on Saturday was to fill a State Senate vacancy for the rest of the year, and the Texas Legislature is not in session until next January.
If he is to affect legislation, Mr. Rehmet must win re-election later this year against the same Republican he just beat, Leigh Wambsganss, a longtime conservative activist endorsed by Mr. Trump and top Texas leaders. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who runs the State Senate, chalked up the result to the “always unpredictable” nature of special elections, and vowed to take back the seat in November.
As for his parents, Mr. Rehmet said that they supported him, even if their politics were not always aligned. In one digital campaign ad, Mr. Rehmet spoke from a kitchen table about prices, a plate of food in front of him, with his mother seated to his right, shaking her head.
“My mom always told me not to talk about money at the dinner table,” Mr. Rehmet said to the camera before talking about the cost of groceries, health insurance and property taxes. His mother, presumably won over, added at the end, “I’m Taylor Rehmet’s mom, and I approve this message.”
J. David Goodman is the Texas bureau chief for The Times, based in Houston.
The post After His Democratic Victory in Texas, a New Working-Class Star Rises appeared first on New York Times.
